Chapter 31
Papa! Look! Lion! Grr, lion, grr!
—Kaia Luna (3) to her petrified father, Iosef
BOWEN WOKE TO a sense of warmth and softness all along one side of his body. He was groggy with the vestiges of a heavy sleep, but he knew Kaia’s touch, her scent. Snuggling her closer with the arm he must’ve put around her in sleep, he felt her go suddenly motionless . . . and he realized the wet on his chest was from her tears.
About to turn to face her, he became aware of a far smaller source of warmth curled up on his breastbone. Cracking open his eyes, he saw Hex’s peacefully sleeping form. So he turned his head instead, to look down at where Kaia lay with her head on his chest, her hair a dark waterfall over him.
His body told him he’d been asleep for hours, and when he glanced at one of the slumbering machines, he glimpsed the timecode: 5:57. He’d lost all of yesterday after the operation. More importantly, he’d lost time with Kaia.
“Tesoro mio,” he said, the endearment falling off his tongue as if he’d been waiting a lifetime to say it to her. “Why are you crying?”
Fingers flexing on his chest, a shaky exhale, but she didn’t speak. He stroked her hair, trying to think of what would drive his strong and fierce Kaia to tears.
“I hate hospitals,” she said at last, the words a rasp.
Bowen pressed a kiss to the top of her hair, the strands luxuriantly soft under his lips. “Were you in one as a child?” Cassius had a hatred for hospitals, too, and the roots of his hate lay in the same incident that had ended with a dead telepath and a blood-soaked thirteen-year-old boy.
“Not as a patient.” She took a deep breath, her fingers rising to gently stroke Hex’s sleeping body. “My mother was a doctor who worked in struggling clinics all over the world, places that couldn’t really pay and were often funded by charities.”
He heard no fear or hate in those words, only a soul-deep sadness. “Did you ever go with her?”
“Our whole family traveled as a group.” She placed her hand flat over his heart again. “The three Lunatics. From Africa to the Pacific to the Americas to the heart of Asia.” Her lips curving against him. “When I was an infant, then a toddler, my father would keep me with him through the day and—after I outgrew the crib—I’d spend it splattering paint on canvases while he wrote lyrics or painted.”
He could see her now, a bright-eyed child gleefully splashing in paint as the world changed around her. “Palm trees one day, giraffes the next?”
She laughed. “I met a lion once. He prowled out of the forest while I was toddling about outside after climbing out of the playpen when my poor father left me alone for one minute to use the outdoor toilet—from that point on, he started putting a leash on me and hooking the leash to something immovable if he had to step out to use the facilities.”
Bo whistled. “Jesus, I wouldn’t want to walk out of the john and see my daughter facing a lion.”
“I had my hand fisted in the lion’s mane and was kissing his face.”
Bo choked. “Changeling?” he guessed.
“Alpha changeling.” Kaia rose up on her elbow to look down at him, her gaze lit with an inner glow. “He’d come to check us out. We had permission to be in the area, but he wanted us aware that we were in lion territory.”
“Yet he let a baby kiss his face.” Bowen smiled at the image that formed in his mind, of a plump toddler clutching at the golden mane of a large, patient lion. “A good alpha, then.”
“Yes. A very good alpha, I later found out. His pride is one of the most stable on the African continent.” She brushed strands of hair off Bo’s forehead. “When I grew a bit bigger, my mother would sometimes take me into work with her. Only when it was a small clinic and she was doing routine work. The people who came didn’t mind—they used to bring along their own children and I’d play outside with them.”
Running his hand over her back, Bo said, “What happened?”
And the light in her, it dimmed, flickered, faded. “My parents got sick and died,” she said baldly. “And I began to hate hospitals.”
A tiny scrabble of feet, Hex coming awake. After going to Kaia for a stroke, he ran down the bed and off along one of the legs.
“I’ll need to open the door for him,” Kaia murmured.
“After a second.” Bowen wrapped his arms around her and held her close. “I’m going to get out of this place,” he told her. “You won’t have to watch me die.”
“You have a powerful will, Bo.” Her lips kissing his jaw. “But even your will can’t change hard medical facts.”
Bowen’s hand fisted on her back. “Maybe not,” he said, “but I don’t plan to go without a fight.” And if the result was to be oblivion, he’d leave Kaia with memories of joy; he wasn’t a man who knew how to play, how to court a woman, but he’d figure it out because leaving her with only sorrow was fucking unacceptable. “You are the greatest gift of my life.”
Kaia’s breath broke before she pushed away from him and got off the bed. Scooping up her pet, she walked to the door, opened it. When she paused and looked back at him, it was with eyes so dark that he knew he was talking to both sides of her nature. “I don’t know if I can.” The words seemed torn out of her. “I don’t know if I have that much courage.”
She had so much courage, he thought as the door closed behind her. She might have shut away a part of herself, but she loved with such generous warmth that it was a luminous light around her. He’d seen how the teenagers came to her for hugs, spotted how clanmates tugged her aside for advice or conversation, heard it in the steel of Dr. Kahananui’s voice when she’d told him to treasure Kaia.
He hadn’t needed the instruction; Bowen would do everything in his power to build memories so beautiful that even if it all went wrong, she couldn’t look back in regret. They might only have a fragment of an instant in time, but he’d make that fragment extraordinary.